Demetrios, a mummy dating from the first century A.D., has been in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum for almost a century, but this year curators and conservators are seeing a whole new side of him—the inside.

In preparation for “To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum,” a three-year tour of 11 U.S. venues beginning this summer, members of the museum staff are cleaning the almost-2,000-year-old mummy and repairing any damage that has occurred since it first came to the museum, nearly a hundred years ago. In addition, they are subjecting Demetrios to several medical and forensic procedures, including X-ray fluorescence, carbon dating, and GC Mass Spec, a test that examines chemicals employed in the mummification process, as part of a study undertaken with the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and England’s University of Bristol. Researchers hope the tests will help them gather information about Demetrios and his culture. Says Lisa Bruno, a conservator at the museum who is working on the project, “We don’t really know who these people were.”

One of seven human mummies in the museum’s collection (which also includes 69 animal mummies), Demetrios was excavated from a Roman cemetery in Hawara, Egypt, in 1911 and brought directly to the museum, where he’s been ever since. Because his wrappings were fully intact and in good condition, researchers didn’t want to disturb them, and therefore have never really examined him up close. The mummy arrived with its red-painted linen shroud mostly intact and with a portrait painted on a thin wood board tucked into the linen over the body’s face showing very little deterioration. The portrait, depicting a dark-haired man, in addition to a gilded inscription on the shroud reading “Demetrios 89 years,” gave researchers some of the few clues they had about the mummy, who is one of only a dozen “red shroud” mummies known in the world.

Since then, technological advances have made it possible to learn more. This summer Demetrios took a trip to the North Shore University Hospital on New York’s Long Island for a CT scan, which researchers hoped would tell them more about who he was, how he died, and what objects, if any, were buried with him. (The excursion was also a good opportunity to test the custom shipping materials created to transport the mummy for the tour.) One of the things researchers wanted to examine in particular was whether the words “89 years” inscribed on the shroud referred to Demetrios’s age.

The scan produced hundreds of X-ray-like images and answered several questions. Demetrios was buried alone, and the doctors assisting the procedure estimated that, judging from the absence of degenerative disease in the skeleton, he did not labor for a living and was not 89 when he died but more likely in his 40s or 50s. The images also revealed that two ribs were broken, likely to remove the lungs during the mummification process, and that Demetrios was buried with his mouth open, although it’s unclear whether it fell open during or after the mummification process, or if it was intentionally left open, perhaps to allow his soul to escape his body.

The scans also introduced new mysteries. They revealed a bundle tucked into Demetrios’s abdomen that Bruno and the museum’s curators at first hoped was a heart scarab but that, given its density, is likelier either soft tissues from the body or papyrus. Doctors in the scanning booth said that it could also be gallstones. Other tests have perhaps been more conclusive. Chemical analysis of the red paint used on the shroud, for example, has pinpointed the exact mine in Spain from which the lead in the compound came.

Several questions remain, including what Demetrios died of. “We don’t really have that much data to work with,” says Bruno. “But we do have more now than we did initially. We’re just trying to figure out how to manipulate these images in a way that’s much more readable.”